Bram Stoker’s classic Gothic horror novel Dracula set the template for modern vampires. Forget the over-saturation of pop culture cliches. Get past the Victorian prose and sensibilities, and you’ll be surprised at the contents: migration, xenophobia, sexual politics, science versus superstition, and a fear of contagion.
An epistolary novel told through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles, Dracula has no single point of view protagonist. It’s a found-footage horror story that mixes media, far ahead of it’s time. Fragmentary, disjointed, the shifting perspectives make for a disturbed, disturbing and alienating read. Though not as disturbing as it might be, for we don’t get the Count’s point-of-view. He is the perpetual outsider, the other.
Inciting horror
Solicitor Jonathan Harker takes a business trip to complete some paperwork for a client, the Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. In the wild, uncivilised lands of ‘heathen’ Eastern Europe, Dracula is an aristocratic parasite feeding off the blood of the common people to maintain his immortality. And worse than that; his plan to colonise the Empire with an army of the undead from Eastern Europe would have terrified the educated British readers.
In a twisted, romantic quest, the Count embarks on a journey to England in pursuit of a ‘lost love’ he believes reborn as Mina Murray. The battle with the supernatural begins…
The real protagonists?
On his return to England, young Harker, broken by his experiences in Transylvania, recedes from the centre of the story.
The vampire-hunter Van Helsing bridges worlds; old and new, science and superstition, East and West. A foreigner, an alien in British society, Van Helsing is both denigrated for his origins and lauded for his expertise. It’s a role Stoker, an Irishman, must have known well.
But it’s Harker’s fiance, Mina Murray, who is the real protagonist. A schoolmistress, typist and stenographer, she is technically accomplished to the point the boys rely on her analytical skills.
And we realise, Dracula is urban fantasy. Set in Stoker’s contemporary world, our heroes rely on the modern technology of typewriters, phonographs, and telegrams to fight a supernatural force.
When the Dracula leaves his ancestral home for the modern world, much of his powers diminish. The Count belongs to the past, not even immortality is powerful enough to resist the march of modernity.
What makes Dracula a classic?
First, a classic character. Not merely a monster, the Count is cultured, educated, intellectual. Immortality gives Dracula plenty of time to learn English better than Van Helsing, and English law better than Harker. He is predatory, vindictive, controlling. He is also a shapeshifter, a cunning predator from lands beyond ‘civilisation.’ He doesn’t need much of his arsenal of super powers, he is dangerous enough in his plan and his purpose. Dangerous enough to emasculate and make impotent his male hunters!
Second, Harker’s encounter with the vampire brides is a scandalously erotic horror all of its own. Poor conflicted Harker is seduced and repulsed.
Bram Stoker’s Vampires are undisguised sexual predators. Vampirism turns Lucy Westernra from a chaste maiden to an aggressive sexual predator, like the brides of Dracula who prey on Harker at the castle. The Victorians feared female sexuality even as the number of sex workers and STD’s hit record levels.
Third, the doomed voyage of the Demeter is archetypal horror, as one by one, the crew fall victim to the ‘alien’ among them.
Fourth, the transformation of Lucy from maid to monster; from victim to predator. No longer human, vampire-Lucy knows no restraint, no taboo, no morality. Consumed by the infection, the hunters have no choice but to destroy her. Which they do in the most violent and graphic horror sequence.
This extends into Mina’s descent into vampirism herself; not merely the violation of the pure woman, but the damnation of a pure soul. Forced, or seduced, Dracula brings Mina to the psychological horror of broken faith and damnation, the terror of the mind within. It remains deeply disturbing and sacriligious to the ‘pious’ Victorians.
The Legacy of Dracula
Dracula is not simply a creature-feature, a monster-hunt, or eroticised horror-thriller; although it is all of those. Nor is it the execution of a concept into a fully realised supernatural threat. Dracula embodies themes that are subversive to this day.
As provocateur, Stoker plays on the entitlement, prejudice, and conservatism of his readers at the same time as he provokes and titillates them. No wonder Dracula scandalised London society and sold poorly on first publication. But it continues to seduce us, just as Dracula and the Brides seduced their victims.
Published on the cusp of a leap into the modernity of the twentieth century, Dracula isn’t a unique work. Frankenstein established science fiction eighty years earlier. H. G. Wells, Conan-Doyle, and Robert Louis Stephenson wrote fantastical, thrilling fiction for a mass audience.
But Dracula dared approach taboo subjects in the guise of popular fiction. Sexual deviancy, gender empowerment, the rise of feminism, the science of blood transfusions and other cutting-edge technology feature here. Stoker included some early psychoanalysis, only a few years ahead of Freud. Stoker, the mischievous Irish spirit, also plays on the fears of his British hosts; the threat of other races, the collapse of Empire and the reverse-colonisation by immigrants, of which he was one.